the head of the church, Cant. 5:1, making merry with his friends and companions: "Let us be drunken, my beloved," [drink abundantly, Rev. Vers.]. But the two other parts in the hand of the Lord and to be purged through the merit of the church are set forth by those two parts which the priest holds in his hands, the greater, being laid down, signifies the militant church and the lesser, resting upon it, signifies the church waiting in purgatory. For this church in purgatory depends upon the suffrages of the church militant. And for these two parts we pour out our double prayers to the Lamb, who is the head of the church, that he may have mercy upon us. But as for the third part, to whose dwelling-place and rest we look forward, we pray that the same Lamb of the three-fold nature may at last give us peace. For this reason, Christ in his state of humiliation visited three places of the church, (1) the navel of our habitable world, dwelling thirty-three years in Judea and Jerusalem; (2) the limbus, in which the Fathers were purified, by bringing out a fragment of his church in the spirit, and (3) ascending to heaven he led captivity captive, which, after his triumph, he crowned by placing it at God's right hand.[1] This, therefore, is the three-fold division of this one universal or catholic church, although, however, there are particular churches.
- ↑ Jerusalem was regarded in the Middle Ages as the navel of the earth. The cross, according to Jerome, was erected over Adam's skull, which Shem had carried to Jerusalem after the Flood, and buried on the future Mount Calvary. Noah, according to Jacob of Edessa, had taken Adam's bones with him into the ark. The region limbus patrum was, according to the Schoolmen, the future abode, where the patriarchs and faithful Jews were detained until Christ's "descent into Hades." The future world is divided into five abodes, hell, the "place of dolors" (Th. Aquinas), and "the deep prison into whose smoky atmosphere the demons are cast" (Alb. Magnus); purgatory, a sort of reformatory school, where the baptized are purged of sins clinging to them at death; heaven; and the abodes of the fathers and infants, limbus infantum. The last is the final dwelling-place of all unbaptized children dying in infancy, where they abide forever without hope of beatitude, without change, and without vision of God or physical light.
he drinks. The priest holds the two larger parts so that the smaller of the two lies upon the other. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, 3: 84 [Migne, 3: 851], mentions the custom of dropping a fragment into the cup.
